Ask SWC: What’s New in SQL Server 2014?

Microsoft just announced the release of SQL Server 2014 this week. As you know SQL Server 2012 came out some time ago and was heavily focused on a lot of Business Intelligence improvements for the enterprise. Now all of a sudden we have many users adopting BI that are hitting our SQL Servers pretty hard. As a result, Microsoft has focused on more performance enhancements in the 2014 release. Watch my “Ask SWC” blog to learn more. Microsoft SQL Server 2014 is a comprehensive data platform and Business Intelligence solution. Some of the new 2014 features include enhancements to in-memory built in technologies, so things run faster within the organization like Pivots. Microsoft has also included high concurrency to eliminate redundancy in the enterprise and additional performance improvements that have people reporting 25-35% faster performance for the BI assets they have running. Speaking of BI assets, along the way of SQL 2012, we moved forward to the new Power View asset from a Tabular model to a multi-dimensional cube being utilized in the backend, which is now officially integrated within the new SQL Server 2014 release. Additionally, Microsoft has extended the AlwaysOn functionality that was brought to us in SQL Server 2012. This is the ability to have replication to multiple locations, in the past there were only three servers and now you can leverage eight. There are also many backup opportunities as well as backup in the cloud with Windows Azure integration in SQL Server 2014.

Speaking of the cloud, this is going to be your first launch into Power BI integration in Office 365. We talked a little bit about the official launch of Power BI, a self-service business intelligence solution, a few weeks ago and SQL Server 2014 is going to enable that because with Microsoft you can not only use the cloud information, but you can also use the on-premise data as well. Microsoft SQL Server 2014 will definitely provide a powerful asset to your organization.

At SWC, we have a lot of exciting Business Intelligence events coming up in the next couple weeks that will give you the opportunity to come talk to us about new SQL Server 2014 features and functions as well as continuing the cloud discussion.